Interview: Trouble with the Turbo Grafx-16

[RNSpeed]

Well you know what they say, Hindsight is 20/20. Dude being a ex VP of Marketing from Atari should have been clue on why they thought bigger was better. lol

Yes thats why Atari fall from the same cliff

[spenoza]

I think that I've read that before.

What a f*cking incompetent idiot!

Yeah ... "Before that I was VP of Marketing at Atari" ... but he had no idea that Christmas was a major buying time, and that parents are the buyers. That's even though they wanted to target slightly older players.

Then the whole "we made it bigger because people expected that", rather than actually figuring out how to market the smaller hi-tech aspect ... you know ... vinyl records to smaller CDs, big tape decks to small Walkmans, large old computers to smaller computer, etc, etc.

Instead ... let's delay our time-to-market and redesign it as a big and ugly empty box.

A talentless paper-pusher.

The larger Gamasutra article puts this in context. Basically, the initial NEC USA staff was all appliance folks, trying to sell the system like a VCR. And Japan really did cock-block the entire process, all along (which we already knew). But I didn't realize that NEC's advertising was constrained by major over-manufacturing of the system, and I also didn't realize that the redesign took so long. I know the system came to the US late, but I thought that was NEC not acting early enough. I didn't realize they were doing things, sitting on a commercially viable piece of hardware, for so long prior to the TG-16 release. Having a year on the Genesis and 2 years on the SNES could have made a difference, though given NEC Japan's treatment of the US staff's ideas, it might only have made so much difference.

Also, really unhappy how Hudson basically shat on TTI (still talking about the Gamasutra article). I mean, I knew a lot of that already, but it's still annoying to be reminded in such detail. Hudson just wanted to extract themselves from the market. They already made all their royalty money on the initial NEC over-production of 3/4 of a million units. No point trying to squeeze out a minuscule amount later. Of course, given the PC-FX, maybe they should have tried harder to stay in the game in the US.

[Black Tiger]

When did NEC and Hudson Soft of Japan admit to ruining the Turbo brand from before day one?

[xelement5x]

If they really had to make it bigger, why not go all the way and stick the multi-tap and turbo-booster in it from the get-go? I know why, because they wanted to sell you those things sepparately, but seriously, just imagine marketing it as the first game system with 5 players built-in, with no need for a multi-tap, and showing off Multiplayer Bomberman and Dungeon Explorer footage to promote it?

Btw, that R-Type commercial would have been the s***!

Funny that you mention marketing. I remember the N64 doing exactly that with four ports.

Yeah, there were a lot of missed opportunities in the advertising for sure.  I mean the Genesis was a great system but one of the main reasons it succeeded as much as it did in the US was the stellar marketing team. 

[crazydean]

If they really had to make it bigger, why not go all the way and stick the multi-tap and turbo-booster in it from the get-go? I know why, because they wanted to sell you those things sepparately, but seriously, just imagine marketing it as the first game system with 5 players built-in, with no need for a multi-tap, and showing off Multiplayer Bomberman and Dungeon Explorer footage to promote it?

Btw, that R-Type commercial would have been the s***!

Funny that you mention marketing. I remember the N64 doing exactly that with four ports.

Yeah, there were a lot of missed opportunities in the advertising for sure.  I mean the Genesis was a great system but one of the main reasons it succeeded as much as it did in the US was the stellar marketing team.

I think you mean to say, "BLAST PROCESSING!!!"

[esteban]

I think you folks are being overly critical.



Americans certainly want to get their money's worth, and they *do* love things that are curiously elongated.

Just ask my priest.